The civil service is strongly committed to equality of opportunity for all in terms of its recruitment and employment practices. Our commitment is demonstrated and documented with key actions in the Civil Service People Strategy and the Our Public Service Renewal Strategy, both of which are to be renewed this year.
As the Deputy will be aware, the Public Appointments Services (PAS), which is an agency under the aegis of my Department, is the principal recruiter for the civil service. PAS plays a central role in attracting a diverse range of talented people to take up employment opportunities in the civil service.
PAS has a Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee in place with both employer representatives and external experts in diversity and inclusion, working closely with officials in my Department. PAS will shortly launch an updated ED&I Strategy and has extensive engagements with NGOs from a diversity and inclusion perspective, including representatives from organisations including, for example, Mi-Wow, New Communities Partnership, AkiDwA, Business In The Community, the National Youth Council, the Immigrant Council of Ireland as well as groups representing members of the Traveller and Roma communities. Recently hired civil servants that identify as coming from an ethnic minority background have also presented to a number of career fairs and Institute of Guidance Counsellor conferences to share their experience of working in the civil service.
PAS has introduced a voluntary mechanism where applicants applying for civil service roles can opt, if they wish, to voluntarily complete an ED&I survey alongside their application that includes information on race and ethnic origin. Officials in my Department and PAS have recently analysed large volume open competitions undertaken in 2020 to identity, on an aggregate basis, diversity trends and some details are set out in the attached Table 1. It should be emphasised that this Table only reports on individuals who opted to voluntarily identify as being from an ethnic minority background and, as such, the statistics for candidates from an ethnic minority background may be under-representative.
Civil service employers do not currently request ethnic background information from civil servants, and any information voluntarily collected by PAS is not passed on to Civil Service Departments on assignment. As such, data for existing civil servants is not available centrally at present.
Employee demographic data is recognised as being critical to both baselining, evaluating and reporting progress in further embedding ED&I initiatives across the Civil Service. An action of an ED&I Working Group recently established in my Department is to explore how aggregate ED&I data might be captured to a common data standard by all Civil Service bodies, adopting best practice while being particularly mindful of data protection and other statutory obligations, noting that data related to racial or ethnic origin is deemed to be special category personal data under GDPR.
It is expected that equality, diversity and inclusion will continue to be a core component of new Civil Service Renewal and People Strategies that are currently being developed for implementation from this year, ensuring that we continue to build a diverse civil service that is reflective of the modern Ireland that we serve.
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In the case of candidates that voluntarily identified to PAS
as being from an ethnic minority background
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2020 Civil Service Competition
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Total Applications for competition
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Number of such candidates at application stage
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% total applicants
for competition at application stage
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Number of such candidates subsequently placed on panel
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% of successful candidates subsequently placed on panel for assignment to a civil service employer
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Temporary Clerical Officer
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7,437
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178
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2.4%
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70
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2.4%
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Clerical Officer
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26,356
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481
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1.8%
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14
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1.8%
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Executive Officer
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14,602
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344
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2.4%
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4
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0.01%
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Administrative Officer (Graduate Entry)
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8,259
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619
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7.5%
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4
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4.4%
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Assistant Principal
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3,821
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30
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0.8%
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1
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1.1%
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Principal Officer
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1,754
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16
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0.9%
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1
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1.5%
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